The Hatfield clan poses in April 1897 at a logging camp in southern West Virginia. The most infamous feud in American folklore, the long-running battle between the Hatfields and McCoys, may be partly explained by a rare, disease inherited by the McCoy clan that can lead to hair-trigger rage and violent outbursts.(AP Photo)Disease underlies Hatfield-McCoy feudBy MARILYNN MARCHIONE, AP Medical Writer Thu Apr 5, 6:18 PM ET
The most infamous feud in American folklore, the long-running battle between the Hatfields and McCoys, may be partly explained by a rare, inherited disease that can lead to hair-trigger rage and violent outbursts.
Dozens of McCoy descendants apparently have the disease, which causes high blood pressure, racing hearts, severe headaches and too much adrenaline and other "fight or flight" stress hormones.
No one blames the whole feud on this, but doctors say it could help explain some of the clan's notorious behavior.
"This condition can certainly make anybody short-tempered, and if they are prone because of their personality, it can add fuel to the fire," said Dr. Revi Mathew, a Vanderbilt University endocrinologist treating one of the family members.
The Hatfields and McCoys have a storied and deadly history dating to Civil War times. Their generations of fighting over land, timber rights and even a pig are the subject of dozens of books, songs and countless jokes. Unfortunately for Appalachia, the feud is one of its greatest sources of fame.
Several genetic experts have known about the disease plaguing some of the McCoys for decades, but kept it secret. The Associated Press learned of it after several family members revealed their history to Vanderbilt doctors, who are trying to find more McCoy relatives to warn them of the risk.
One doctor who had researched the family for decades called them the "McC kindred" in a 1998 medical journal article tracing the disease through four generations.
"He said something about us never being able to get insurance" if the full family name was used, said Rita Reynolds, a Bristol, Tenn., woman with the disease. She says she is a McCoy descendant and has documents from the doctor showing his work on her family.
She is speaking up now so distant relatives might realize their risk and get help before the condition proves fatal, as it did to many of her ancestors.
Back then, "we didn't even know this existed," she said. "They just up and died."
Von Hippel-Lindau disease, which afflicts many family members, can cause tumors in the eyes, ears, pancreas, kidney, brain and spine. Roughly three-fourths of the affected McCoys have pheochromocytomas — tumors of the adrenal gland.
The small, bubbly-looking orange adrenal gland sits atop each kidney and makes adrenaline and substances called catecholamines. Too much can cause high blood pressure, pounding headaches, heart palpitations, facial flushing, nausea and vomiting. There is no cure for the disease, but removing the tumors before they turn cancerous can improve survival.
Affected family members have long been known to be combative, even with their kin. Reynolds recalled her grandfather, "Smallwood" McCoy.
"When he would come to visit, everyone would run and hide. They acted like they were scared to death of him. He had a really bad temper," she said.
Her adopted daughter, another McCoy descendant, 11-year-old Winnter Reynolds, just had an adrenal tumor removed at Vanderbilt Children's Hospital. Teachers thought the girl had ADHD — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Now, Winnter says, "my parents are thinking it may be the tumor" that caused the behavior. "I've been feeling great since they took it out."
Her adoptive father, James Reynolds, said of the McCoys: "It don't take much to set them off. They've got a pretty good temper.
"Before the surgery, Winnter, when we would discipline her, she'd squeeze her fists together and get real angry and start hollering back at us, screaming and crying," he said.
As for the older McCoys, "they just started dropping dead of the tumors," he said. "They didn't know what it was. A name wasn't really put on the disease until 1968. That's when one of my brothers-in-law had to have surgery, to have some tumors removed in his brain. They started to notice tumors occurring in each of the family members."
Dr. Nuzhet Atuk at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and geneticists at the University of Pennsylvania studied the family for more than 30 years, Rita Reynolds said.
"They went back on the genealogy and all of that stuff," she said. "They called it madness disease. They said that it had to be coming from the VHL. Our family would just go off, even on the doctors."
Now 85 and retired, Atuk said he could not talk about his work because of medical confidentiality.
Rita Reynolds had two adrenal tumors removed a few years ago. Her mother and three brothers also had them. So do McCoy descendants in Oregon, Michigan and Indiana, she said.
"When you have these tumors, you're easy to get upset," said Rita's mother, Goldie Hankins, 76, of Big Rock, Va., near the Kentucky-West Virginia border. "When people get on your nerves, you just can't take it. You get angry because your blood pressure was so high."
Still, many are dubious that this condition had much of a role in the bitter feud with the Hatfields, which played out in the hill country of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia for decades.
Some say the feud dates to Civil War days, when some members of the families took opposite sides. It grew into disputes over timber rights and land in the 1870s, and gained more notoriety in 1878, when Randolph or "Old Randal" McCoy accused a Hatfield of stealing one of his pigs. The hostilities left at least a dozen dead.
"The McCoy temperament is legendary. Whether or not we can blame it on genes, I don't know," said Ron McCoy, 43, of Durham, N.C., one of the organizers of the annual Hatfield-McCoy reunion. "There are a lot of underpinnings that are probably a more legitimate source of conflict."
"There was a lot of inter-marrying" that could have played havoc with the gene pool, he conceded.
Another relative, Bo McCoy, of Waverly, Ohio, said he had never heard talk of the disease although he has been diagnosed with a different adrenal gland problem — Cushing's syndrome.
Even Reo Hatfield, who drafted the "truce" the two families famously signed in 2003 to officially end hostilities, doubted the role of the McCoys' disease in the feud.
"I would be shocked" if doctors blamed it on illness, he said.
Altina Waller, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut and author of a book about the feud, agreed.
"Medical folks like to find these kinds of explanations. Like the Salem witchcraft thing. That book came out about how that was caused by wheat that was grown that had this parasite or mold or fungus or something that caused everybody in Salem to go nuts," she said.
"How does it explain the other dozen or so feuds that I've looked at in other places?" she asked, citing disputes over coal and other issues. "The rage and violence as such was not confined to McCoys."
She acknowledges that an argument could be made for seeing the McCoys as the more aggressive of the clans.
"One of the reasons the McCoys don't like me as much in the Tug Valley as the Hatfields do is that I seem to suggest that Randal McCoy, the patriarch of the family, was sort of irrational and flamboyant and did jump to, into wanting violence more than, say, Anderson Hatfield," Waller said.
These days, the "feud" has taken a far more civil tone and all but disappeared, members of both families say. The last time it surfaced was in January 2003. McCoy descendants sued Hatfield descendants over visitation rights to a small cemetery on an Appalachian hillside in eastern Kentucky. It holds the remains of six McCoys, some allegedly killed by the Hatfields.
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Associated Press National Writer Allen G. Breed in Raleigh, N.C., contributed to this report.
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On the Net:
VHL Family Alliance: http://www.vhl.org
NIH: http://www.ninds.nih.gov/disorders/von_hippel_lindau/von_hippel_lindau.htm
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000340.htm
(An earlier version of the story misidentified Ron McCoy of Durham, N.C., as 'Randy')
The above found here on the net* * * *
I wonder if George W. Bush should be tested for the genetic defect. * * * *
[
click here] for
The Navy admiral overseeing United States Central Command, the military structure that is carrying out the war in Iraq and other military operations in its vicinity, appeared to imply in congressional testimony yesterday that the United States had made a "deal with the devil."
Actions Last Month Followed Probes 
![Freed Iranian envoy Jalal Sharafi [L] with Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki](http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/42775000/jpg/_42775937_saharafp.jpg)
The Multi-National Force Iraq was not involved in his kidnapping or any kind of claims of torture 
"About one-third of the nearly four dozen U.S. attorney's jobs that have changed hands since President Bush began his second term have been filled by the White House and the Justice Department with trusted administration insiders," writes the Washington Post.
The problem with these idiots (the ones that are idiots not the ones that are mouthpieces for the regime) is that they claim our policy is irrational because it has not worked. No, what would be irrational is to expect a totalitarian dictatorship to respond rationally to the carrot or the stick. By their nature such regimes are capricious and irrational. Having a policy that seeks to limit such a regime's cash flow is the most rational thing to do.
Posted by: Henry "Conductor" Gomez | Sunday, April 01, 2007 at 09:27 AM
Arthur Schlesinger died in early March of this year. He was greatest maligner of the Cuban people, the inventor of the myth of pre-revolutionary Cuba as as an economically and socially backward country deserving of a Communist Revolution. Arthur Schlesinger was also Kennedy's lapdog for more than 50 years, in life as in death. This "esteemed historian" wrote the infamous "White Paper" on Cuba of April 3, 1961. The so-called "White Paper" was issued two weeks before the Bay of Pigs invasion and may have convinced Kennedy that Cubans deserved nothing better than betrayal as they were the world's most barbaric, immoral and despicable people, fully deserving of whatever fate befell them. According to The New York Times (April 4, 1961): "President Kennedy devoted many hours to the pamphlet, personally going over it with Mr. Schlesinger."
Former U.S. ambassador to Cuba Spruille Braden characterized the "White Paper" on Cuba as "calumny, cheap demagoguery and a despicable act, unworthy of a responsible government and foreign office. The White Paper's direct and implied animadversions as to the poverty and bad economic conditions of Cuba, prior to the coming of Castro, are inaccurate and evidence the socialistic preferences of its drafters."
"This document begins by giving approval, i.e. encouraging what it calls the 'authentic and autonomous revolution of the Americas,' that is, to promote more fidelismo but without Fidel. For my part, I prefer to see the sound evolution of the Americas without the violence, abuse and waste inherent in all revolutions. Nor do I consider it wise or proper for my government to advocate "authentic and autonomous revolutions" all over the American continents."
Schlesinger was the man that Kennedy chose as his conduit to Cuban exiles before the invasion. While he lied to the Cubans about his own and Kennedy's support, Schlesinger literally poisoned the well for them.
In a memorandum to Kennedy, dated April 5, 1961, Schlesinger advised him to abandon the freedom fighters at the Bay of Pigs:
"On balance, I think that the risks of the operation slightly outweigh the risks of abandonment. These latter risks would be mitigated somewhat if we could manage a partial rather than a total abandonment (i.e., if we could put the men into Cuba quietly).
We might also be able to make some diplomatic capital out of the abandonment. We might have Thompson say to Khrushchev, for example, that we have discouraged an invasion of Cuba; that this shows our genuine desire to compose differences; but that K. should tell his friend to behave, because our patience is not inexhaustible and we cannot hope to restrain the Cuban patriots indefinitely. Conceivably we might be able to turn abandonment to some diplomatic advantage within the hemisphere too."
Schlesinger spent the rest of his long deceitful life defending Kennedy's "indiscretions" and blackening the name and past of the Cuban people.
http://www.fas.org/irp/ops/policy/docs/frusX/76_90.html
Posted by: Manuel A. Tellechea | Sunday, April 01, 2007 at 09:54 AM